Anita,

1. I don’t remember specifically what teachers would say in preschool, but I know my dad would try to help me learn the alphabet and I felt bad that I wasn’t picking up on it like other kids. I knew my dad had to help me because I wasn’t learning it. I actually don’t remember my preschool teachers talking to me much (maybe they did and I don’t remember or maybe they just didn’t), but my mom told me that they would say something is wrong with me to her and my dad. I think teachers would call my parents in for a parent-teacher conference and say “I don’t know what’s wrong with her but something is wrong, maybe she has autism.” I have considered that maybe I’m autistic but I highly doubt it because I’m aware of what’s going on socially and I just don’t really exhibit any symptoms. I also took tests online and I always come up as “not likely to be on the spectrum.” As for grammar schools, I also don’t remember my teachers talking to me much. I had one or two nice ones, but I remember I had a lot of mean ones who would yell at me instead of helping me. I had a lot of trouble paying attention in class, and teachers would be very nasty to me over it. I think that when teachers yelled at me for not paying attention, it hurt me more than it helped me. It wasn’t really a behavior problem that I had, my mind would just wander and I didn’t know how to bring it back. When teachers would yell at me, I think they thought I wasn’t paying attention because I was a bad student. But that actually wasn’t true, I wanted to pay attention but I just couldn’t. I felt sad that I couldn’t do well in school and I truly wanted to.

2. My mom didn’t really say anything specifically to make me that way, but I think there were a few things she did. I don’t think she was as involved in my life as she should’ve been. I noticed everyone else’s mothers would stand up for them and fight for them, but my mom wasn’t really aware of when I was mistreated. Going off of what I said in the above paragraph, I feel that my mom should’ve defended me to the teachers that would yell at me. I wish my parents would’ve figured out what caused me to be unable to pay attention (maybe it was ADHD, maybe it was me dissociating because of how anxious I felt) and told my teachers that it’s not okay for them to yell at me as if I need to be punished for something I couldn’t help. I think all those times that people/teachers would try to punish me for things I couldn’t help, I became passive and believed something was wrong with me. I also should’ve told my parents what was happening, but I didn’t know there was anything to tell because I thought I was just a bad kid.